We’ve been talking about the new siege system for a while now. While we have given you some of the specifics, we had to be vague on some things we were not yet sure about.
The new siege system is now complete and is going through final testing. Today we’ll present it to you in detail, leaving out only a few parts we’re still testing/balancing. As we mentioned before, we rewrote the entire system to be fully configurable. This gives us the ability to make very quick changes and to correct any imbalances that may come up when the new siege system goes live. Below we mention considering making some further changes, these can be made in no time at all. Thanks go out to Jon, who rewrote the siege system and to Vaggelis who gathered the information and wrote it up for us today:
The start of a siege is one of the few elements that have remained the same in the new system:
Your clan needs to be at war with the defending clan and you will need to use a clan shard in the vicinity of the clan stone that you wish to capture. From here on the system has changed in quite a few ways. First, clan size will affect your ability to initiate sieges. A siege against a city will require more members than a siege against a hamlet. Characters on trial accounts do not count towards clan size.
Once you use the clan shard you will get a confirmation dialogue informing you of the wager you will need to place in order to take part in this challenge. If you accept, the gold will be taken straight from the clan bank and the clan shard will be used up. If you decline, nothing happens. If there is insufficient gold in your clan bank you will not be able to initiate the challenge. Note that all attacking parties will need to pay a wager. Attacker holdings will not be going vulnerable.
The amount of the wager is affected by a few factors. First of all by the defending holding’s power level. A holding’s power level depends on how many of its’ buildings are standing. To make this clearer, a holding that allows for 10 buildings to be built will have a higher power level than a holding that allows for 5 provided at least 6 of them are actually constructed.
The second wager determining factor is how many attackers are already part of the challenge when your clan enters it. If you are the first clan declaring siege you don’t need to worry about this but the second challenger and onwards will need to pay a progressively higher wager. There is no hard cap to how many challengers can participate in the siege but the wager amount will eventually become quite high.
Joining the challenge late will also result in a higher wager. Every hour that passes since the first clan issued their challenge, means that potential besiegers will need to dig deeper in their pockets to take part in it. The same goes for ambitious conquerors that want to participate in more than one challenge, at the same time. Every additional active offensive action will result in higher wager prices.
After the challenge has been successfully declared, the attackers will have a specific amount of time to place at least one siege stone; even clans owning holdings will need to do this as, like we’ve already mentioned, their holdings will not be going vulnerable. Now, this may seem to favor the attackers but in the new system absolutely anyone can declare siege against anyone else, at the same time. So if you are going off to besiege a holding while you own one of your own, you better be prepared to defend it at the same time as your offensive action is taking place. Furthermore, if your clan drops a siege, the defenders may benefit from a wager reduction if they decide to pay you back in kind while your offensive action against them is active.
After the siege stone placement has finished, the usual preparation phase follows. One quick change we are considering is making siege stones go vulnerable some time before the clan stone does. This way we defenders a chance to take them down before they need to start defending their clan stone.
When the challenge becomes active, a certain percentage of walls will need to be destroyed before the clan stone goes vulnerable, just as it is now. Once this has been accomplished, anyone will be able to damage the clan stone. An attacker’s siege stones can be attacked and destroyed by anyone, like with the current system. However, if they are destroyed by any of the other attackers that are participating in that specific challenge (or the defender), then the destroyer’s clan will be getting a percentage of the wager paid by the siege-stone owner, right there and then. Attackers that have all their siege stones destroyed, while the clan stone still stands, are removed from the challenge and are not entitled to any of the wager money.
If the clan stone is destroyed before the challenge times out, holding ownership will pass on to whichever of the clans that had issued a challenge did the most damage. The wager money will be divided between all attackers that still had an active challenge against the holding when the clan stone got destroyed. Damage dealt to the clan stone will affect the percentage of the wager each attacker will get. Damage dealt by clans that had not issued a challenge against the holding will not be calculated for the wager distribution neither for deciding which clan gets the holding. So for example if clan-A that had active challenge does 20% damage, clan-B does 10% and clan-C, that had not issued a challenge, does the remaining 70%, the holding will pass to clan-A and clan-C would not be entitled to any of the wager money.
If all the attackers’ siege stones are destroyed or the challenge times out while the clan stone still stands then the defenders have won and they will be receiving all the wager money.
Some more things that are under consideration include restricting the use of small siege stones to hamlet sieges, and medium and large siege stones to city sieges. This will make hamlets more accessible to smaller clans as larger clans will not be able to bind as many of their members to them or benefit from the increased hit points of the medium and large ones.
We are also considering adding a variable grace period to holdings where no one will be able to declare siege on them. This grace period will be applied after a challenge has been completed and its length will depend on the outcome of the challenge. If the holding has just been successfully conquered by a clan, the grace period will be longer, allowing the new owners to settle in, rebuild and enjoy the fruits of the labours for a little while before having to defend. If the city is successfully defended then the grace period will be quite shorter.
Finally, this new siege system will bring with it a new database that will be storing all information that has to do with sieges. Every detail will be stored from who challenged whom, and when, to specifics like which clan did how much damage to a clan stone during which siege. This will help us with fine tuning the system once it goes live and we may also provide some way for players to check out holding ownership history and the like.
As you can see the new system brings substantial changes to how sieges work, and will not only eliminate issues like self-sieging, but will also make sieges a lot more strategic, profitable and interesting.
Your feedback on what we’ve posted here is, as always, greatly appreciated.
Thanks for reading.
